As web sites become more ubiquitous, businesses are increasingly interested in setting performance goals and quality standards for their web sites. One way to achieve these objectives is to simulate an end user's experience with a company web site. By simulating the end user's experience, a company can determine the integrity of links and resources in the page and rate a customer's experience against the operational goals defined by the business. Furthermore, information technology departments of companies will be better able to track and measure critical web resources. In addition to simulating an individual customer's experience, simulating multiple customers simultaneously will allow companies to stress test a web site and detect trends in site performance, thus allowing the company to address problems before they arise.
One way to simulate a user's path through a web site is to record all the requests made by a user. In order to do this, it is generally necessary to route a user's requests through an intermediate server, typically a proxy server. However, the use of proxy servers requires significant technical expertise because each browser must be individually configured to go through the proxy server. This problem is accentuated by the fact that different versions of the same browser can require unique configuration. A further limitation on the use of proxy servers to track a user's web page requests exists because user's requests can not be routed through any other proxy server. This is becoming increasingly problematic, as a growing number of companies require employee requests to be routed through a company proxy server. Proxy servers are used in order to limit the web sites to which an employee has access and to gain efficiencies by caching popular web sites. If web site content is cached at a proxy server, any response to a request for that web site will come from the proxy server's memory and not from the target web site. Thus, the request will never actually go beyond the company's servers and will therefore not be recordable by the second proxy server, i.e. the proxy server that would have tracked the user's request.
Several of the disadvantages of using proxy servers can be overcome by routing web page requests through an intermediate web server. When a web page request is made from the intermediate web server, the HTML text of the target web site will be changed or mediated so that links in the target web site are first routed through the intermediate web server. For example, several web sites have been developed to mediate target web site text so that the text reflects the dialect of social groups or popular cartoon and movie characters. Furthermore, these sites mediate web links so that any pages requested from the mediated page are also mediated. The methods used by these web sites, however, do not handle dynamic content such as JavaScript, forms, side image maps and other essential web techniques.